Rats may be an unwanted housemate, but they don't deserve so much hostility
from humans.

The rat that is leaping down through the Virginia creeper from the roof of my house to the ground is so fit and handsome, with his glossy brown coat, shell-pink hands and feet, ears of mushroom-coloured silk and bright shoe-button eyes, that if I could exhibit him at an agricultural show he would win himself a blue ribbon. He and his tribe have made homes for themselves in the long border, in the old pipework that criss-crosses my three acres, under the hen coop, in rabbit warrens under the hedge, under the weed mat by the carp pond and everywhere else as well.

As the weather grows colder, I expect to hear rats running through the space between the kitchen ceiling and the upstairs floorboards, play-fighting and squeaking, thumping, scratching and gnawing. They like to slither and leap in the cavity wall between the kitchen and the dining room. As their tails flick behind the plaster, my dinner guests lay down their forks and gaze at me in horror, their meal half-eaten.

If they could see into the dark border beneath the dining room window, they’d find five or six rats dining along with us, nibbling daintily at the sunflower kernels that the tits have let drop from the bird feeders. The more attractive your garden is to wildlife, the more rats it will harbour.

In a vain attempt to outwit my rats the young gardeners put the food for their hens on a suspended scaffold board instead of scattering it on the ground. The rats hanging about under the beech hedge would wait until they heard the slam of their car door and then dash into the hen run, take a running jump onto an upright, scramble up it, and then fling themselves across onto the board where I have seen as many as half a dozen rats feeding on expensive poultry pellets. Where we scatter corn for the doves, you may see, at any time of day or night, rats combing through the gravel, scavenging for any fragment of a kernel left behind. The doves’ food is kept in a galvanised iron bin with bricks holding down the lid, and yet I find shiny new rats’ droppings around it every morning. Somehow the rats have found a way to lever up the lid, and get in and out.

If you have poultry you must have rats. Much as I would like to pretend that rats and poultry can peacefully coexist, it is not the case. Rats steal eggs, and kill chicks, ducklings and even goslings. More than once, I have found a missing gosling tugged into a rat run, unconscious, with its feet chewed off and its heart still beating.

People who think rats can’t climb are simply wrong. They can make use of any angle, any ledge, the tiniest of footholds, to propel themselves upward. I nail flanges of tin around the entrances to my doves’ nests, but the rats find another salient, if necessary leaping from roof to roof. They can run up drain pipes and along guttering, looking for a fissure through which they can squeeze into a roof space. Now that we all have insulation in our lofts, we can’t even hear them as they burrow into the dry warmth and bring forth their six litters a year. Recycling is another boon to rats for whom every compost heap is a cornucopia.

Rats know us very well; we know very little about them and much of what we think we know is wrong. Rats living wild are very clean animals. They groom themselves and their mates frequently. They live in families, usually all descended from the same female, with a dominant male in charge, and are very protective of their young.

In captivity rats can be trained to carry out quite complex tasks. A rat which was taught to press a button for food and was given the food on every fourth press, quickly learnt to press the button four times in quick succession. Your dog probably couldn’t figure that one out.

Now that I have made public the fact that I have rats, I may be prosecuted. It is an offence for any landowner knowingly to let rats live on their property. For their part, rats have no rights. I may not allow my dogs to hunt wild mammals, but I can allow my dogs to hunt and kill a rat, even though it certainly is a wild mammal. Rats and rabbits were specifically exempted from the Hunting Act, and my dogs may kill them with impunity. A dog with a rat will grab it by the scruff of the neck, give it a sharp shake, and drop it. The rat’s spine being broken, its body will jerk once or twice but it is probably feeling nothing. The dog meanwhile has walked away. This for a rat is a merciful death, far more merciful than any it can deal out to its prey animals.

Very few rats (outside a laboratory) live to their full lifespan of three years; it is thought that as many as 95 per cent of the rat population will die in their first year through predation. Nevertheless, given the vast numbers of rats that are coming in from the fields at this time of year, I must use poison if I am not to be overrun. All rat poisons are appallingly cruel. I can call the pest control officer from the local council, but he will use the same kind of poison or a worse one.

Rats are too intelligent to take a bait that will kill them instantly, so they must be dealt slow poison. These take up to two weeks to kill the rat which suffers severe pain as it haemorrhages internally into muscles and joints.

These days, rodenticides based on Difenacoum are licensed in Britain for amateur use indoors and outdoors. Any creature feeding on the carcase of a rat poisoned with Difenacoum or any other coumarin-based anticoagulant, will die, and so on through the food chain. Simply laying such a toxic bait indoors will not prevent its escape into the wild, because rats, like people, live both inside and out. As Difenacoum is easily available online, there is no way that its use can be monitored.

The latest weapon in the armoury against rats is composed of a water-retentive material such as alpha cellulose plus an attractant; these work by blocking the gut and preventing the absorption of water through the gut wall, so the rat effectively consumes all its fat reserves and dries out. Rodenticides of this kind are safer to use than anticoagulants because they are both fully biodegradable and ineffective against other wild species, but they are not merciful in their mode of operation.

You can try so-called humane traps, if you are determined to cause maximum stress to no useful end whatever. The rat is a social animal; if you trap it and free it a mile away it will struggle desperately to rejoin its family. You can try the kind of good old-fashioned rat trap that is meant to kill the rat. The outcome is anybody’s guess; the trap may work properly and break the animal’s neck, or the rat may spring the trap and escape, or be held by the snout or a paw or the base of the tail.

A wounded, terrified rat is a very dangerous creature. Supposing you can find a way to get hold of a rat that is dragging a trap around, your best course is to dump it in the water butt and drown it. Rats can swim. A drowning rat will struggle for many interminable minutes. Glue traps leave you with a similar conundrum, how to mercy-kill a frantic rat that is stuck to a board.

All of which leaves a single alternative, a sonic rat repeller, if only such a thing existed. Most studies report no repellent effect for short wave, high frequency sound; a few report that rats are initially repelled – which is not surprising because they are neophobic and suspicious of any change in their environment – but will return to their old haunts within a few days. Electromagnetic devices have no repellent effect whatsoever. There are many of both on the market, most of them expensive.

Which leaves us back where we started, with dogs. They are, as they always have been, the best option; even so they’re not particularly effective. Rats will continue to lodge with us, and we will continue to persecute them with exemplary brutality.